Southern Italy’s Diverse Heritage (part I)

After completing our annual month of Italian language study in Rome, my wife Carole and I headed south for yet another tour of Southern Italy’s many cities, towns, and villages.  We had traveled to the South on at least three previous visits. Our itinerary included stops from the totally unknown to the familiar, including the now famous UNESCO National Heritage town of Matera.

What we knew from our previous trips to the South was that it is a diverse region of productive countryside, bustling urban centers, well-preserved medieval villages, and neglected towns that manifest still the South’s historic poverty.  We designed an itinerary to experience this diversity. Taken together, the well-maintained and the neglected locations, they never fail to tell us something important about Italian history and contemporary culture.

After Rome our first stop by train was Naples, what must have been our fourth visit to the city. If Rome is considered busy and congested, then Naples must be considered chaotic.  As Neapolitan novelist Elsa Ferrante writes of her native city, “Ah, there is no city that gives off so much noise and so much clamor as Naples.” Naples in many ways typifies the South’s complexity.

I disagree with those who idealize the city and simply call it beautiful. Naples certainly does have its beautiful streets and tranquil neighborhoods. Its churches, principally its Duomo, where San Gennaro’s blood supposedly liquefies twice a year, are unrivaled in the world. The Farnese marbles in the city’s National Archeological Museum are unsurpassed and had a profound effect on Michelangelo’s style. Yes, “See Naples and die,” but only after you see the Farnese Marbles. But as Ferrante writes, Naples’ racket, stalled traffic, narrow, apartment-lined streets with space for little more than a Vespa, are what smack the visitor in the eye initially.

But if the visitor knows where to look, the depth of Neapolitan culture and history are everywhere. In our tour of underground Naples, we saw its nineteenth-century viaducts that once served as the source of water for the city. At the end of our tour we descended again below a modern apartment and stood in the midst of a Roman theater, discovered little more than fifteen years ago.  What else is under its streets?

On a stroll through Naples’ commercial district, our first stop was its famous nineteenth-century Galleria Umberto I on Via San Carlo. This remarkable structure with its glass dome is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since World War I, its baroque interior has been neglected but is now in the process of restoration. Because of its location, it has been the center of twentieth-century Neapolitan life and history. It also has a very interesting connection to American history. It was the setting for The Gallery (1949), written by American writer, John Horne Burns (1916-1953).

The Galleria was the location of a club where gay G.I.s and local gay men gathered at a time when homosexuality was a forbidden subject just about anywhere in the world.  Burns, who would die all but forgotten in Florence, wrote his novel when three American divisions were encamped on Naples’ periphery. “In August of 1944,” Burns tells us, “the Galleria Umberto echoed like a bowling alley to the noise of the truck convoys going north to the front.”  With a destroyed economy and the American presence, Naples was an open, lawless city whose black market was stocked with stolen goods from American commissaries. Burns’ protagonist says, “I met agile dapper thieves who’d steal the apple out of my eye if they could sell it on the black market.”  Which of the cafés in the mall was actually the club in Burns’ novel is hard to determine. But during a recon mission one early morning, I wanted to believe that I had found it in an obscure, abandoned corner of the mall. Today, its cafés under the natural light that floods through the glass dome are restful places to have a beverage.

The noise outside that once rattled the glass panels of the Galleria has since abated. Today, Via San Carlo in front of this majestic space is devoted largely to pedestrian traffic and is currently undergoing a complete resurfacing with beautiful paving stones. The avenue’s glossy commercial district contrasts with the adjoining narrow, apartment-lined streets. The balconies of the apartments, of course, are festooned with laundry flapping in the wind, that iconic, popular image of the city. But the reality is that those balconies are the sign of working-class Naples, residents who live in small apartments and struggle daily to put food on the table and to raise all those chattering school children who fill those narrow streets each morning and early afternoon.

Below the surface of the thump and grind of the city’s energetic flow of people and grid-locked traffic, of construction noise and emergency vehicles’ wailing sirens, is, of course, the Camorra.  As Robert Saviano revealed in his Gomorra, it is the city’s criminal gang that maintains order and controls just about everything, from the distribution of illegal cigarettes to knock-off shoes and clothing coming through the port.

But if there is order in the city, it certainly is not visible. Some years back we visited the city when white bags filled with garbage were stacked in the streets soaked with toxic juices that ran into the gutters.  Was it a broken civil system? Or was it the Camorra deciding to stop collecting the garbage until the municipal government met their unstated demands?  When I asked a friend why, he just shrugged. Then he added, “but you can bet someone will make money when the Camorra decides it is time to collect the garbage.” The city finally found the solution: to take the garbage by truck to the port and send it off shore to a dump. Not surprisingly, according to Saviano, the Camorra controls the port.

As Elena Ferrante explains in her novels, crime, poverty, and desperation plague the lives of all her Neapolitan characters. Those small apartments towering over the narrow streets in the city’s center are where her characters are forced to live their emotional lives, which are as tangled as Naples’ traffic. If the traveler walks the side streets and observes, Ferrante’s Naples becomes evident in the appearance of the young men hanging out in groups in the markets, the African immigrants hawking their wares on the streets, and the working class ladies, of both the night and day, on the streets.

In Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, protagonist and novelist Elena Greco, wrote about this seamier side of life in Naples and was viciously attacked by friends and relatives. Greco’s famous novel brought too much attention to the neighborhood. It was bad for the Camorra’s business. Even a friend was forced by unnamed but obvious neighborhood forces to sue her for defamation. Greco’s male friends and relatives appear with unexplained bruised and battered faces. Whom had they crossed? She had written about modern Naples, mixed “the legal and the illegal: the bar-pastry shop, shoe factories, mini-markets, night clubs, loan sharking, cigarette smuggling, receiving stolen goods, drugs, infiltration of the post-earthquake construction sites.”

To be fair, Ferrante’s account of Naples includes as well the upper-class comfortable neighborhoods. We followed her trail to the Vomero district, reached by a brief funicular ride. Its large apartments overlook sun drenched streets lined with trees. By early afternoon rambunctious school children fill the sidewalks. One afternoon we strolled through this tranquil setting and ended up at the Castel Sant’ Elmo. Its origins date to the late thirteen century under Charles d’Anjou before it was expanded to current size by King Robert of Naples in the late fourteenth century. From its ramparts the visitor can get a revealing view of Naples’ true size and complexity.